Thursday, 23 August 2012

* * Cake Walk by October Afternoon * *

Hello, it's Laura here and today I would like to talk to you about themed collections. I generally keep clear of themed collections from manufacturers as I think one or more of the following :

* I will never scrap enough camping/halloween/sports photos to use a whole collection

* Even if I do scrap tons of the above, I don't want them all to look the same anyway

* The range won't work for scrapping anything else

* I will end up using just one generic sheet of patterned paper and then the rest will be wasted/sat languishing in my stash until I finally give up and throw it out/give it away/move it out

So I was a little disappointed to see October Afternoon's lastest release "Cake Walk" was birthday themed.

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I know that we all have birthdays and we all celebrate birthdays of our loved ones but I was still a little concerned about the thoughts in my head. See above for aforementioned thoughts.

But I love October Afternoon and thought that maybe I needed to give themed collections another chance and I am so glad that I did.

A lot of the "a sides" in this collection are very heavily themed for a children's birthday theme, which of course may be completely perfect for you, but my baby has yet to celebrate even one birthday, let alone multiple ones.

But just look at the gorgeous "b sides" in this collection! A wonderful array of grids, stripes and chevrons in pinks, greys and greens! I love them all (and this doesn't often happen in a collection!) So I would urge you to consider both sides of a piece of paper when making a decision to buy or not. Lots of these papers I would have ruled out due to a heavily themed side and I need to slow down and consider the beauties that might be lying just the other side! ﻿

The journalling cards and stickers are all birthday themed, they talk of cake and celebrations and well, birthdays. All together the look very themed and a little bit limiting to other pages but I think a huge part of that is because I know that they are meant to all relate to birthdays but if you start to seperate the pieces and look at them out of their context, in this case the whole sticker sheer, then they start to link to birthdays less and to other, well days, more.

I created this wedding page using this birthday themed collection... but I didn't have to scrap about my birthday or even create a tenious link, like scrapping about my wedding cake, nope I could just scrap using this gorgeous papers and embellishments to create a page about my wedding.

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Seperated out the stickers just commerate a special day, in this case, my wedding day. The colours are bright but soft and just pefect for a delicate wedding page. But also wonderful for all sorts of scrapping, a day out with the childrem, new baby pics or graduation photos.

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So don't rule out themed collections without looking at them a little more closely as you may well be as surprised as I was!